Sunday Supplement: On Reading and Writing

I don't think I could ever be a novelist. Not a good one, not the sort I'd want to be, at least. For all my fandom makes me dream of vaulting the divide and becoming a creator, as well as consumer, of stories, I grow increasingly aware that I lack what I consider the most important in a novelist. Literature may have moved away somewhat from the notion that a novel is first and foremost about stories and characters, but if I had to chose (and thankfully I don't!), I'd take a solid character driven story from a Bronte (any of them, really!), or Daphne du Maurier, or Salman Rushdie or Haruki Murakami or Jeffrey Eugenides etc over clever post-modern narrative or lyrical prose or fabulous dreamscape description any day.They are my heroes of literature, the writers who take me out of my skin and place me in another, who let me see the world through another pair of eyes, or show me worlds I'm never likely to see. Yes, that's right, when I read I value escapism over all else. And that shouldn't be a dirty word.

Why couldn't I write that sort of fiction? I consider myself a capable wordsmith, and sometimes I even come up with ideas that I think could make good plots. (Sometimes, I even start to write them down - shhhh.)
But where I come up short is in basic human empathy. The simple truth is that I seem to lack empathy and self awareness and social awareness. That doesn't mean I don't have huge amounts of caring and sympathy for myself and others, simply that I don't know myself very well, and even more so I don't know other people. I find it impossible to put myself in another person's shoes. In writing, this results in weak, two dimensional characters that I fail to engage with. Ironically - is this ironic? I've never quite got to grips with the concept of irony and still misuse it regularly - I think I could possibly write the sort of idea heavy fiction, or even biography disguised loosely as fiction. Not very well, mind you! But I don't want to. I don't want to write something I wouldn't particularly want to read.

So, that is a long rambling overly confessional way of saying that I love reading fiction because it gives me something I don't have in my everyday life. I've been reading The Great Night by Chris Adrian this week and above all else I'm hugely impressed with his compassion, his understanding without judgement of human nature, his basic goodness. For a re-writing of A Midsummer Nights Dream - and therefore a book full of fairies - it is amazingly down to earth, a veritable feast of the mundane. Its not so much magical realism, as realist magic, using the mundane to explain our need for a sense of magic, rather than magic as a way of comprehending the everyday. It is a tour de force that every bit lives up to the praise that has been heaped upon it, one of those books I turned page after page after page compulsively, to find out what would happen to our portfolio of characters, and through them to learn more about myself and the world around me. For that is the great thing about escapism - like immigration - : we take with us some of our experiences and knowledge and discover new things that become part of us, expanding our horizons in ways we could not otherwise have dreamed. To be a bit hyperbolic (something I'm often guilty of!), I think fiction both entertains and makes me a better human being. Why would I chose to add mediocre work to the mounds already written, when I can wallow for years in the great work that others have slaved over? It is a lot better for me, that is for sure.

On resolving a question that has plagued me for nearly half my life

Okay, so 'plagued' may convey slightly too dramatic an impression of my relationship with this question, but I hope my readers will forgive my resorting to hyperbole given the circumstances.

As long as fourteen or fifteen years ago, when starting my GCSE history course I was asked why I seemed drawn to 'important' history, to dictators and king's and queens, rather than the social history that my political and social views seemed more akin with. At the time I struggled to come up with a suitable answer - suitable to me, at least -  and in the intervening years, through a History and Politics degree, and a History MA, I returned occasionally to the question, frustrated by my inability to provide a succinct answer. How, for instance, can I profess a belief that history is written by the common person at least as much as it is the head of state, while focusing my study on that head of state? Why, if my favourite history book is John Reed's observations of the atmosphere and revolutionary milieu of the common people during the Russian Revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World, am I then so keen to return to studies of Lenin and Trotsky and the like? Why, when it is through everyday fiction that I advocate the most effective means of recounting history - I'm a big advocate of Rudyard Kipling's sentiments that "if history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten" - did I not delve deeper into the real life stories that these books fictionalised?

At the time my best explanation was that I was interested in the personification of ideas, of the origins of those self same ideas and the lives that inspired them. This remains true, but today I revised it further, and perhaps came as close as I ever will to explaining to myself just what it is in history that interests me.

I am interested in personal stories. It is as simple as that. History, to me, provides a near bottomless resource thereof, and it is these personal stories, connected to an identifiable individual, that engross me. The more complex and in depth they are, the better. Popular history rarely provides such characters through which to view life, and as such, I struggle to identify with it. There is only so much interest I can show in the artifacts of everyday life, if they are not tied into a wider story of someone else's life. I like fiction because it enables me - who finds empathy so difficult - to gain insight into other lives, and much the same can be said of history. Disconnected objects require faculty in said empathy, which being so absent in me means that the objects essentially remain simply objects. They stand for nothing more than they are.

High history, on the other hand, is replete with strong, interesting, and emotive characters with whom to identify (one need not like, to identify with, or to be interested by their story). Because so many histories, biographies, and contemporary accounts have been written about them, their lives are vivid, thorough, and fully fleshed out. They are characters as might exist in a novel: full of strengths and weaknesses and, above all, to those who dig deep enough, human. That is what attracts me to them, the search for this humanity, the desire for someone to lay their persona out for me and let me imagine them as real people.

The sad truth is that, in general, there are few such recorded everyday characters. Were this not the case, I would undoubtedly be drawn to them over their overlords, and revel in being so. It is individual human stories I crave. History has to live to interest me and while inanimate objects, social groups, or even ideas may hold their own attractions to others, they can never compete with the individual characters that dominated my study of history.

This self-discovery, while irrelevant to most, is a big step in understanding the motives that often remain hidden to me. It came while reading Charlotte Bronte's largely unheralded novel, The Professor, and will, I suspect, remain inextricably linked with that book hitherto. Just another example of the awesome capabilities of the story.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Read: May 2009

I seem to spend a lot of my time praising novels for aspects like their ingenuity, their intelligence, their sheer descriptive prowess. And these are all important qualities in a book. But what I like best is a good story. A good story which surrounds me so completely that the action becomes more vivid than the physical world around me. I like to be inundated by the words in such an immediate sense that I feel their breeze against my skin and believe that I am an unseen ghostly presence hovering somewhere between the full stop and the start of the next sentence.

What I like about each of the Bronte novels I have read so far – Jane Eyre and now Wuthering Heights – is that they are just this: stories. And proper thick as warm porridge drenched in honey stories too. Stories to listen to enraptured around a camp fire, stories to read huddled with a torch under the duvet at 3am because you cannot sleep for thinking about what is going to happen next. Everything that is great about each of them lies in the quality of the story, in the beguiling narrative and engaging characters. It seems to me that cut off as they were from the literary milieu of London the Bronte's wrote stories to entertain themselves rather than demonstrate their worth as writers, wild flights of fancy as adventurous and exciting as any Don Quixote type epic adventure could ever be.

Wuthering Heights is the story of two deeply flawed individuals, Catherine and Heathcliff, of their mutual obsession and the destruction it wreaks upon all who know them. I don't know who it was that first advanced the idea of theirs being a great love story but I doubt they had ever actually read the book. And if they had, and this is their idea of love, then I am glad I wasn't anywhere near them. The story of Catherine and Heathcliff is one of two wilful people who seem unable either to live either with or without each other. As Cathy explains early on, "...he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...I AM Heathcliff." They love and hate each other as they do themselves. At times they can barely stand to be together and at others they claw and scratch at each other as though trying to find a way to actually open up their bodies and climb inside each other. I think Kate Bush captures this odd relationship best:

“Out on the wily, windy moors
Wed roll and fall in green.
You had a temper like my jealousy:
Too hot, too greedy.
How could you leave me,
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you. I loved you, too.”

Wuthering Heights is a brooding psychological obsession/revenge/ghost story set against the domineering backdrop of the North York Moors. Plot, setting, and characters all have a sense of windswept wilderness to them. Heathcliff is the sort of libertine-esque highwayman who does what he likes in life knowing that no-one is going to stop him. The cold and calculating manner in which he enacts his vengeance makes for disturbing and uncomfortable reading. He is the bad man who gets away with it without remorse or shame. This lack of moral ambiguity makes him an enthralling character. And in her own histrionic, selfish, and spoiled way Catherine is just as bad. Wuthering Heights is the book I always wanted to read as a child, where roles are reversed and events don't follow the usual pattern of stories. The baddies not only capture the hero, but hang him mercilessly before escaping to hatch their next dastardly plan.

Emily Bronte doesn't care whether the reader likes her characters or not, makes no effort to justify or smooth their actions. The tale is merely placed on paper and left for the reader to make of it what they will. It is a masterpiece of controlled atmospheric storytelling and caustic characterisation. It is a wonderful read which I highly recommend to everyone.

9 out of 10

(There are many great reviews of Wuthering Heights out there. One of my favourites can be found here.)

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

What makes a great novel? Is it beautiful, lyrical, prose written with an intrinsic kind of poetry? Is it the pace of the plot which drags you along by the nape of your neck forcing you to turn page after page long into the night? Conventional wisdom will tell you that the perfect novel lies somewhere between these two, and there is no doubt that Jane Eyre superbly achieves each of these requisites. But, to my mind, there is something else that makes a book great: the narrative voice. A great narrative voice which reads like it is whispering solely to you and takes you into its confidence so that the world comes alive and real before you, is the most important thing in literature. It does not matter if a book has very little plot, such as with Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man, or Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, or Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Nor does it matter if the language is not beautiful, as in Hemingway, or Philip K. Dick. Because if the narrator keeps you close and unfolds their world to you so clearly that you see and feel and smell exactly what they see and feel and smell, then there is an intimacy far closer than you find in everyday life.

And the point of this? Not only is Jane Eyre well written, with mystery and intrigue to burn, but in its eponymous narrator, it has one of the most enthralling voices I have encountered. You don’t just get inside her mind, you actually begin to feel that your mind is as one with hers. She is wilful, stubborn, independent, lovable, intelligent, naïve, craving and so much else besides. She is neither proud, nor a walkover, and takes the rough with the smooth without seeming to differentiate between the two. Throughout the first half of this novel you cross every bone in your body that she will find love and happiness, and when she does your disbelief is matched by hers. When things turn sour you share her resigned certainty that it was always going to end out like that. And when she finds a quite existence for herself, you settle in, feeling relieved that things worked out well for her. But hope cannot be extinguished, not while Mr. Rochester is out there and great love is still possible…

I love Jane Eyre, I was hooked from about page 3. The prose is uncluttered beyond belief; reading Jane Eyre feels like reading the English language as it was invented to be read: simple, fantastically evocative, and with an internal rhythm all of its own. And the twists and turns of (sometimes outrageous) fortune keep you guessing, because Charlotte Bronte is too talented to give any hint as to how it will all end. You get the impression that she would just as easily kill off Jane in a wild snowstorm as bestow her heart’s desire. It is in this uncertainty that the mystery lies.

Jane Eyre is one of those books in which the progression of one word after another is all the pleasure you need. It is soothing and gentle so that I could happily read it every day for the rest of my life. And I am confident that there would always be something remarkable to discover, because this is a remarkable book. Read it now.

10 out of 10